UNH Goes Even Leftier for MLK Day 2009

My employer, the University of New Hampshire, has announced
the agenda for its 2009 celebration of Martin Luther King
Day, to which they are devoting two full weeks, from January 22 until
February 5.

(I blogged about 2006's events here and
2007's here.
Having nothing new to say, I skipped 2008.)

You might guess that, starting a couple days after the inauguration
of President Obama, UNH might present a largely celebratory, unifying
event, and some mention might be made of the progress made since King's
day, exemplified by the election of a president who (as he
once put it)
"doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."

Boy, would you be wrong.

Now, some things remain unchanged: the University will once again
sponsor a "Spiritual Celebration" at the local community church,
something it would never do for an actual religious holiday. As usual,
everything is dripping with sanctimony and tendentious
rhetoric about "social, political, and economic justice."
And while the events are billed as being in support of "University's goal
to cultivate an inclusive learning community of mutual respect and a
shared spirit of inquiry,"
just as in previous years, the sole voices invited to participate
are those from the left wing.
(More on that in a bit.)

This year's theme is "One in 100: Dismantling a Prison Nation".
It springs from the claim that the US has
"more than one in every 100 adults
confined behind bars." As you can guess from the wording,
there's no indication
that there just might be some room for sane discussion on
the issue. It's the newest cause, there's only one side, and dissent
will not be
on the agenda. For example, the "Educational Panel"
is billed this way:

A_____ D____, while advocating for a shift from punitive to restorative
justice in the way our criminal system addresses crime, asks the
question, Are Prisons Obsolete? Through productive
conversations with a prison warden, a social worker, legal
professionals, and academic scholars, audience members will have a
chance to examine the social, economic and political implications of
answering YES.

Fortunately, for the sake of the "learning community", the answer
has been worked out ahead of time. It's "YES."

But I've left out the best part. By which I mean: the worst part.

A_____ D____ above is Angela Davis, described on the page
as an "UC Berkeley professor
and internationally known civil rights activist".

One obvious botch: Davis was at UC Santa Cruz (from which she recently
retired) not Berkeley. And the
remainder of the description
is notable for what it doesn't say. Among the high
points, culled from Wikipedia and David Horowitz's
Discover the Networks page:

Angela Davis was a doctrinaire big-C Communist for many years, winning the Lenin
Prize from East Germany in 1979. She ran with
perennial CPUSA candidate Gus Hall
for Vice President on the
party's ticket in 1980 and 1984.
She remained with the Party until 1991 (Horowitz says she was expelled,
Wikipedia says she "broke" from the Party); the issue was the USSR coup
of "hard liners" against Gorbachev, which the CPUSA supported, and Davis
opposed.

But another claim to fame was her appearance on the FBI's Ten Most
Wanted List in 1970, only the third woman to achieve this honor.
She earned her spot having bought the guns used
in a hostage-taking at the Marin County courthouse, including the
shotgun used to blow a judge's head off. She remained at large for a
couple months, but was apprehended in New York. A year and a half later
she was acquitted of murder, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy charges.

As noted, since then Davis has gravitated to the usual employer
of last resort for violence-associated
leftists lacking more traditional job skills: in the Bill
Ayers/Bernardine Dohrn tradition, higher
education welcomed her with open arms. At UCSC since 1991,
she brought down a six-figure salary as a professor in
the—I swear I am not making this up—"History of
Consciousness"
Department. (Horowitz claims that historian Page Smith
established this program "to demonstrate that the Ph.D. is
fraud.") And of course, she continues to rack up $10K-$20K
per speaking engagement. (I don't know how much she's getting
from UNH.)

Since her Communist days, Davis claims now to favor "democratic
socialism". However, she "points to Cuba as an example of a country
which successfully addresses social and economic problems." So she
probably has a slightly different conception of democracy than what
we're used to.

Even more than usual,
UNH has chosen hard-left polarization and divisiveness for MLK Day 2009.
Davis's personal association with violence and with an ideology that
provided death, repression, and privation for those unfortunate
enough to come under its control make her an especially lousy
choice.

URLs du Jour

2008-11-29

I have mixed feelings about this story describing
efforts to make a movie based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation.
I blogged about re-reading the book here:
while I loved Asimov, the talk/action ratio in his books is very, very
high. (At Granite Geek, David Brooks has a similar
reaction.)

But the same old questions come to mind whenever they talk about making
movies out of classic science fiction works:
where is the movie version of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?
Stranger in a Strange Land? The Door Into Summer?
And why couldn't they have played Starship Troopers straight?

This isn't much of a URL; you can only read the first 100
words of a front page WSJ story about Robert Rubin, but the
lead paragraph is probably enough:

Under fire for his role in the near-collapse of Citigroup Inc., Robert
Rubin said its problems were due to the buckling financial system, not
its own mistakes, and that his role was peripheral to the bank's main
operations even though he was one of its highest-paid officials.

Hey, Citibank? One of your card-carrying customers here.
Although I lack even a diploma-mill MBA,
I have an suggestion: stop paying huge salaries to people
who are peripheral to your main operations.

Fedora 10 Impressions

Posting has been light the previous few days because of…
Thanksgiving? No! Well, at least not that much. Instead, a lot
of my time has been devoted to explorations of Fedora 10, a new
version of the Linux distribution I use at home and work,
released earlier this week. Some random notes:

I opted for fresh installs on unused disk partitions.
Although an "upgrade" path is available, the docs say
"In general, fresh installations are recommended over upgrades."
And for once, I decided to go that way.

That's fine, although my old Fedora 9 systems had accumulated months
worth of tweaks, addons, and customizations. And also some
forgotten now-worthless
experimental cruft. So: distinguish the "good stuff" from
the cruft, and
carefully fold it back into the familiar-yet-new system. Maybe come
up with better ways to do things, like integration of my
mail program (Mutt) with LDAP and a local address book.
This is an
ongoing process. Fortunately, to the certain sort of geek I am, it's
also
fun.

Booting the installation DVD still did not recognize the USB keyboard on
my work system, a Dell Dimension E510.
I was presented with a nice, attractive menu
from which I could select… nothing. Fortunately, it had the
default behavior I wanted, after waiting for a minute.

It finally did the right thing with my Dimension's display chipset
(ATI Technologies Inc RV516). This has been a major toothache with
previous versions of Fedora.

But post-install, the system locked up twice, necessitating
a finger on the power button. Both times after I had left
for the day. Grrr, major inconvenience.

Possible source of the problem:
I had deleted the installed GNOME screensaver, and installed the
superior 'xscreensaver' and associated packages.
My speculation is that
there was some weird incompatibility with the X video driver and
one or more of the packaged screensavers, which triggered the lockup.
After (regretfully) removing xscreensaver, and reinstalling GNOME
screensaver, the system has remained up. Albeit with a lame screensaver.

In contrast, my home system (an older Dell Dimension 4500) installed
with only one hitch: installing from multiple CDs, the system
demanded Disk 2 be inserted, but refused to eject Disk 1. Arrgh.
After some fumbling, the only solution was to shut down, resulting
in an unbootable system. Fortunately, starting the install up
again worked fine.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Everyone's favorite argument for nurture over nature returns! Again,
it's pretty good, with generous helpings of humor, imaginative design,
and great special effects.

Long ago, the supernatural world warred with mankind. They were aided by
the titular "golden army": a juggernaut of invincible robots. But eventually
peace was declared, and the robots were stored away at an undisclosed
location, never to be used again.

Which brings us to the present: the bad guy, elf prince Nuada, has
re-declared war on humanity—I hate it when that happens—and
determines to reactivate the golden
army. All he has to do is to figure out where they are, and grab onto
the three pieces of the magic crown that allows them to be commanded.
And guess who is tasked to stop him?

But the golden army is like Chekov's gun: you can't put it out there
without it eventually going off. This climactic scene doesn't happen
until the very end, though. The journey to get there is a lot of fun.

The Big U

Why yes, I did read two Neal Stephenson books in a row. Good
catch.

Specifically, after reading his latest book (Anathem),
I read his very first book, The Big U, which came out in 1984.
Even after nearly 25 years, its sharp satire of college life still resonates on a
large number of notes. The computer technology is dated, of course, but
otherwise…

The Big U follows a loose collection of students, faculty, and
staff through a
(tragically truncated!) academic year at American Megaversity,
an institution of higher learning completely contained in a single
huge building, the Plex. There's Sarah, president of the student body;
Casimir, physics geek; Bud, a new professor; Septimius Severus Krupp,
Megaversity president; and a host of others.

It starts out as kind of a Tom Wolfe-style satire of faceless
bureaucracy, commodified education,
political correctness, and various student types. But
around December, things get a little weird. Then things get very, very,
out of hand, and stride boldly into territory into which Tom Wolfe has
never ventured.

Eventually, even I started to recognize some obvious real-world
parallels between Stephenson's portrayal and a certain actual
institution about 75 miles south of here. A quick Wikipedia check said:
yup, Stephenson wrote this while a student at Boston University.

It's also said that Stephenson is "not proud" of this novel.
While—OK, sure—it's not Cryptnomicon, taken on its
own terms, it's perfectly fine and worthwhile.

Mongol

I hear you asking: are there hordes?
Yes, indeed, there are hordes.
You can't title a movie Mongol without including hordes.
It would be like not having kangaroos in Australia.

There's also throat-singing, of course.

It's the story of Genghis Khan!
It begins in his youth: as a nine-year-old named Temudjin, his dad takes
him on a trip to a neighboring tribe to pick a bride. And it
winds up (minor spoiler for historical illiterates) when he
defeats his rivals to give birth to the Mongol Empire.

The
movie portrays GK as kind of a big sentimental softie when it comes
to his family and friends. Frankly, I doubt it. But this won
over Mrs. Salad, who (I was surprised) really liked it.
And there's plenty of horde-vs-horde blood-splattery for the guys.
Fun for the whole family.

It was filmed mostly in Mongolia.
It's in Mongolian, with English subtitles. (Although at least one
commenter at IMDB scorns the language as being "pidgin" Mongolian, it's
probably authentic enough for most.) The actors are also mostly Mongolian,
except for the one playing the adult Temudjin (he's Japanese), and
the one playing his blood-brother-turned-enemy, Jamukha (Chinese).
In other words, authenticity-wise, this movie compares well
with The Conqueror, which starred John Wayne as Genghis.

Sad News

Although the country at large has been pacified,
the war is still carried on in remote enclaves run by petty tyrants.

The War
Against Christmas, that is. The remote enclave is Florida Gulf Coast
University and the tyrant is President Wilson Bradshaw:

FGCU administration has banned all holiday decorations from common
spaces on campus and canceled a popular greeting card design contest,
which is being replaced by an ugly sweater competition. In Griffin Hall,
the university's giving tree for needy preschoolers has been transformed
into a "giving garden."

[To clear up the Professionally-Written sentence in the
paragraph above: it's probably the sweaters that are ugly, not the
competition itself.]

I Was Wrong

I thought stories
about federal farm policy could not outrage me
further, but I was wrong:

WASHINGTON – A sports team owner, a financial firm
executive and residents of
Hong Kong and
Saudi Arabia were among
2,702 millionaire recipients of farm payments from 2003 to 2006 —
and it's not even clear they were legitimate farmers, congressional
investigators reported Monday.

They probably were ineligible, but the
Agriculture Department can't confirm that, since officials never checked
their incomes, the
said.

The investigators said the problem will only get worse, because the
payments they cited only covered the 2002 farm bill subsidies. The 2008
farm legislation has provisions that could allow even more people to
receive improper payments without effective checks, they said.

I thought the War Against Christmas was over, but I was wrong:
there are apparently
still skirmishes going on:

An annual parade of boats on a Long Island river that dropped
"Christmas" from its name has apparently lost lots of supporters.

To clear up this Professionally-Written Associated Press sentence:
I think it was the parade that
dropped "Christmas" from its name, not the Long
Island river.

Anyway, I liked this from later in the story:

The change was made after some residents complained the name wasn't
inclusive enough.

Tropic Thunder

Written, directed, and starring Ben Stiller, Tropic Thunder follows
the travails of a big Hollywood war movie, filmed on location in
Vietnam, based on a best-selling memoir.
The production is troubled: a novice director can't
control his actors, cameras, or special effects. So the director
gets the bright idea to dump the actors in the remote jungle,
filming them surreptitiously as they make their way back to
civilization. Things go very wrong.

There's a lot of star power in the movie: Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black,
Tom Cruise, Matthew McConaughey, and a host of cameos. Each
is a wicked satirization of Hollywood vanity, vapidity, venality, and
vulgarity.
It's pretty funny.

True fact: this movie satirizes
insensitive attitudes of aforesaid Hollywood types toward the mentally
retarded. But some people kind of short-circuited that
to "this movie makes fun of the mentally retarded." Honest.

As a result,
the DVD includes a tail-end public service announcement, and so does this post:

URLs du Jour

We do
it for a reason that is as timeless as humanity itself:
women. Women have an overpowering biological need to mark
pretty much every occasion, including sunset, by wrapping a
gift and giving it to somebody, along with a card.

Why
do women do this? We put that question to some leading
psychologists, who responded: ``We think maybe they're
insane.''

Pun Salad guarantee:
If you do not laugh out loud during your perusal of this article,
you will receive double your money back, minus a nominal restocking
charge. And we will suggest that maybe you missed reading about the
"Gassy Gus Flatulence Game."

A local friend who watches the weather in Durham, NH, home to a
University Near Here, reports some chilling information:

We are living through record-breaking cold this week, the coldest
daytime highs for this run of days in the Durham record, going back to
1893! These daytime highs would be below normal even for the same
days in January, which are climatologically the coldest days in the
year!

NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of
staffing cuts at The Weather Channel (TWC) on Wednesday, axing the
entire staff of the "Forecast Earth" environmental program during the
middle of NBC's "Green Week," as well as several on-camera
meteorologists. The layoffs totaled about 10 percent of the workforce,
and are among the first major changes made since NBC completed its
purchase of the venerable weather network in September.

We previously
noted the efforts of TWC's "Heidi Cullen, Climate Expert" to revoke
certification of meteorologists who dared to express skepticism
about global warming. The report says that "Cullen's future role at the
network is not known." Here's hoping!

I was going to blog on the silliness of reactions to Sarah Palin
doing a video interview with turkey, um, processing going on in the
background. But just go read Captain Ed and pretend
I said it, OK?

But, on a related note, Jarvis DeBarry of the New Orleans
Times-Picayunegot a little suspicious of
a letter-to-the-editor.

A letter arrived at this newspaper via e-mail last week that bizarrely
links the incoming president's improbable rise to the world's most
powerful office to the writer's idealistic desire that Americans enjoy a
meatless Thanksgiving dinner.

"Barack Obama has risen from humble beginnings to the power of the
Presidency," the letter begins. "But, every one of us has the
Presidential power to pardon a turkey on Thanksgiving."

Some intrepid investigation revealed the letter was fraudulent. If you
see the above phraseology in your local paper's letters column,
the staff probably got suckered.

Yeah, like most sane people, I think I'd rather be Governor of New Mexico than Secretary
of Commerce.

URLs du Jour

Hello? Bailout people? Mr. Secretary of the Treasury Paulson? Aren't you
forgetting somebody? Like me? I'm a print journalist. Talk about
financial meltdown! Print journalists may soon have to send their kids
to public schools, feed dry food to their cats, and give up their leases
on Prius automobiles and get the Hummers that are being offered at such
deep discounts these days.

Andrew J. Coulson ponders
the hypocrisy involved in President-elect
Obama sending his kids going to the private Sidwell
Friends school while he steadfastly opposes private school choice
programs.

And while many reports will no doubt trumpet the $25,000+ tuition at
Sidwell Friends, implying that this is extravagantly beyond what is
spent in D.C. public schools, they will be mistaken. As I wrote in the
Washington
Post and on
this blog, D.C. public schools also spent about $25,000 per child in
the 2007-08 school year.

It’s not that president-elect Obama is against spending a lot of
money on other people’s kids — he’s just against
letting their parents choose where that money is spent.

URLs du Jour

Mandatory sexual harassment training will soon be coming to
a University Near Here. Or so I've heard.

Out in the People's Republic of California,
it's the law. One professor at UC Irvine, Alexander
McPherson,
is refusing.
Why?

First of all, I believe the training is a disgraceful sham. As far as I
can tell from my colleagues, it is worthless, a childish piece of
theater, an insult to anyone with a respectable IQ, primarily designed
to relieve the university of liability in the case of lawsuits. I have
not been shown any evidence that this training will discourage a
harasser or aid in alerting the faculty to the presence of harassment.

What's more, the state, acting through the university, is trying to
coerce and bully me into doing something I find repugnant and offensive.
I find it offensive not only because of the insinuations it carries and
the potential stigma it implies, but also because I am being required to
do it for political reasons. The fact is that there is a vocal
political/cultural interest group promoting this silliness as part of a
politically correct agenda that I don't particularly agree with.

Your faithful blogger is way more gutless than Professor McPherson, and
hence will meekly submit to the Fascist thought police
indoctrination training. Might make fun of it though. They
can't get me for that. Can they?

Marc Sheppard looks at Obama's recent (taped) speech
to the Governors Global Climate Summit and deems it "an arrogant
concentration of misinformed alarmist hokum". Other than that, though,
it was fine.

Jacob Sullum also
listened to the speech, and was also unimpressed. Obama, he writes,

… continued trying to distract Americans from the
enormous cost of making substantial reductions in carbon dioxide
emissions by promising "five million new green jobs that pay well and
can't be outsourced." Not only is this number pulled out of thin
air; it's nothing to be happy about. As I've noted, the manpower required to
transform the economy so that greenhouse gas emission targets can be
reached is a measure of the cost involved. Obama makes it seem as
if we should try to maximize this cost, promising that green jobs will
"steer our country out of this economic crisis."

Sullum notes (as we have) that this is "pretty much the
opposite of the truth." That's a very diplomatic wording.

Due to various boneheaded domestic economic
proposals, we've been quoting a lot of Bastiat lately.
This
sort of thing indicates that Bastiat-quoting may be
a worldwide growth industry:

Chinese candle exporters will be hit with extra charges when selling in
Europe to punish some producers for selling below cost, the European
Union said Saturday.

For Bastiat fans, that's a big fish in a small barrel, and Vindico
provides the gun.
(Via Pejman.)

Joel Achenbach is in Seattle and taking
pictures. And one caption deserves a Pun Salad quote:

If a bay falls into a gulf and there's no one around to hear it, does it
make a sound?

URLs du Jour

2008-11-20

New Hampshire's own "Jay Tea", estimable long-time blogger
at Wizbang has moved on to blogging at
Contentions under his actual name, J. G. Thayer.
This makes Contentions even more of a
must-read, although I'm wondering whether Mr. Duckie
will be allowed into the high-class joint.

9:17 a.m. — On Tonka Street, tomatoes are thrown at a house, and the
homeowner understandably sees red.

10:59 a.m. — A miniature pinscher runs around Gonic with a leash
attached. Later, Cocheco Valley [Humane Society]
calls to say someone has brought it
down, but that someone from the city should pick it up as they are not
contracted to hold Rochester dogs. Police say they will not respond and
that CVHS should not have accepted the dog. Now they are stuck with it.

2:49 p.m. — A male and female are reportedly fighting near Hanson
Pines, but police find it is some sort of boyfriend-girlfriend wrestling
courtship ritual.

3:40 p.m. — At the Community Center, DCYF calls to say a man by the
tennis courts is urinating in a cup, and 10 minutes later, the agency
calls again to say he is now exposing himself... but when police arrive
just before 5 p.m., he is no longer hanging out.

Much more at the link.

Results from submitting Pun Salad to the
dispassionate analysis of Typealyzer:

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and
problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the
moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously.
They generelly prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid
inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and
highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their
work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving
race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Hellboy

Here's the story: I got this movie as a freebie from Blockbuster a few years
back. But Mrs. Salad refused to watch it with me, so it sat on the
shelf for a long time. The arrival of Hellboy II on DVD finally
pushed the issue; you can't watch Hellboy II if you haven't seen
Hellboy! So I skulked off to a remote corner of Pun Salad Manor,
and:

The movie opens in rainy 1944 Scotland, where some pesky Nazis, aided
and abetted by a resurrected Rasputin, are opening up a interdimensional
portal to awaken
the seven Gods of Chaos, who will come and destroy most of humanity,
with Adolf One-nut ruling over the smashed remnants of civilization.
Thanks to
FDR's paranormal advisor, Professor Bruttenholm, and a platoon of American
soldiers, that doesn't actually happen. Instead the portal merely
poops out a young demon, who turns out to be friendly enough when
you give him chocolate bars. The professor and the soldiers name him Hellboy.

The scene then shifts to roughly present-day. Hellboy has grown up,
considers Bruttenholm to be his father, and
helps continue the fight against evil supernatural monsters and their human
allies. This battle is carried on in secret, largely unnoticed
by humanity in general, although public enough so that Hellboy
has obtained mythical status, like Bigfoot. It develops that the 1944
victory was only temporary, and the same baddies are back in play to
make another try at the Gods of Chaos.

Hellboy is played by Ron Perlman, outwardly tough and gruff, but with a gooey
sentimental core. The movie is a visual feast, with spectacular special
effects and imaginative sets and action pieces. Bottom line: a lot of
fun.

URLs du Jour

Today I heard an interesting idea that I would like to share with
everyone: a plan to finally solve all of the financial woes of the
American People. This is not some pie-in-the-sky pipe dream. It is
within the ability of the U.S. Government at this moment.

The idea is to take a part of the $1 trillion bailout and distribute it
directly to the people. No, not some piddling $1,000 tax rebate. I mean
a real bailout: $1 million to every man, woman, and child in America.
That's approximately $300 million, or less than one-third of the
bailout. Think of it: America, the nation of millionaires.

If President-elect Obama hasn't already picked a Secretary of the
Treasury, he might want to check out Jason A. Czekalski, who has the
kind of, er, creative accounting skills that have been sorely
lacking in previous appointees.

Here's a neat
article showing per-state, per-vote,
TV ad expenditures by the presidential candidates in the recent election.
(Yes, did you hear? We had one.)

New Hampshire was one of three states where Obama spent more than $10
per vote received. ($11.18, to be exact.) In contrast, McCain only spent
$6.94 per NH vote.
(Via Protein Wisdom.)

Let it not be said that Pun Salad is into automatic knee-jerk
Obama-bashing. Pun Salad agrees with everything the President-elect
says here.

But let it be said that Pun Salad thinks
The Big Bang Theory is a wonderful TV
show. It's about time that geek culture
got some prime-time love. Some people have put up a fansite.
So, for example, if you missed Sheldon's rules to
Rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock, it's there:

Run Fatboy Run

Simon Pegg stars as Dennis Doyle. (No, not the 1975-77 Red Sox second
baseman. That is a story for another movie.)

As the movie opens, it's
his
wedding day, and the bride is the lovely (and pregnant)
Libby, played by Thandie Newton. But he gets cold feet and runs off,
leaving Libby screaming in dismay and anger.

OK, so there are at least three unbelievable things right there.

We jump to five years later; Dennis's son is—well, five; Dennis is
still a slacker, but he
gets periodic visits, and he and the kid adore each other.
Libby has taken up with prosperous, handsome,
slick American, Whit (Hank Azaria),
and this makes Dennis feel a tad
competitive. Whit is a runner, and so Dennis vows to run in and complete
an upcoming marathon.

This is all extremely predictable, but it's still quite funny,
thanks to the talents of Simon Pegg and the rest of the cast.

Quantum of Solace

I noticed a few critics had a sour reaction to this movie, but I thought
it was great.

It picks up where the previous movie, Casino Royale, left off.
(I'm not sure how much sense Quantum of Solace
would make to someone who hadn't seen Casino Royale.)
Bond has just captured the mysterious Mr. White, but a bunch of baddies
are desperately trying to prevent him from getting to a safe haven.
The movie begins in the middle of the action with Bond's trusty
Aston-Martin getting pursued by automatic weapon-wielding adversaries
through crowded Italian mountain
roads.

Daniel Craig is a great Bond in my book, and I like the new
seriousness and grittiness he brings to the role.
Judi Densch returns as M; here she's still
developing her relationship with Bond, who has yet to earn her
complete trust. Jeffrey Wright also returns as Felix Leiter, and
he becomes a little more three-dimensional as well.

URLs du Jour

2008-11-17

Make of this single anecdotal datapoint
what you will: while driving around our local
malls this past weekend I saw plenty of traffic and packed parking
lots. I have memories of four previous recessions,
and this doesn't look like them, at least not yet.

The 1,600-year-old work entitled "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict," one of
the world's oldest joke books, features a joke in which a man complains
that a slave he has just bought has died, its publisher said Friday.

"By the gods," answers the slave's seller, "when he was with me, he
never did any such thing!"

The Cleese/Palin version still seems
funnier somehow. The book's website is here. (Via GeekPress.)

The Incredible Hulk

My comic-reading days are long past, but even back then, I was never a
huge fan of The Incredible Hulk. I never found him too sympathetic
or believable. [You mean less believable than those other guys,
like Spider-Man and Iron Man? Yes, that's right.] Unfortunately, that
carries right over to today's superhero movies; I passed on the 2003
Ang Lee Hulk, and I only picked up this one because of the decent
reviews. Eh.

The movie picks up shortly after Bruce Banner has been transformed
into the on-again, off-again green-skinned monster, and has escaped his
captors to live a quiet life in Brazil seeking a cure for his condition.
Edward Norton
plays Banner well, Liv Tyler appears as his girl Betty Ross, William
Hurt is General "Thunderbolt" Ross, Hulk's nemesis and Betty's dad.
Tim Roth plays the villain Blonsky, a soldier tasked with returning
the fugitive Banner, who becomes obsessed with his target, eventually
demanding and receiving his own superpowers, which doesn't turn out well
at all.

In its favor, the movie has a number of recognizable inside gags: Betty
buys Bruce some purple stretch pants; Lou Ferrigno appears as a security
guard; Stan Lee has his usual cameo;
the late Bill Bixby shows up on a Brazilian TV rerun of "The
Courtship of Eddie's Father". When in Brazil,
Banner has an amusingly tough time mistranslating
a classic line from the old TV show. (No spoilers, but it's the
third one here.)
There's probably more I didn't pick up.

This movie is also not the best advertisement for the sanitary practices
in Brazilian soda bottling plants.

Get Rich Quick By Breaking Windows

We seem to be headed into an era of willful economic foolishness,
so you should bring yourself up to speed on the Broken Window Fallacy.
Wikipedia has an entry here.
It was originally described in a typically pungent essay by
Frédéric Bastiat in 1850; you can
read the original French version ("Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas") here, or an English
translation ("What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen") here. Or you can read an
Americanized version from Henry Hazlitt here. Or you can put
up with my brief description:

A crowd gathers
in front of a shopkeeper's shattered storefront window, which has
been broken either by carelessness or malice. They decide
to look on the bright side of things: surely the money the shopkeeper
will spend on repair will be a great benefit! The money will go
to the glass merchant and installer. This will help their businesses,
allow them to
employ more people, allow those people to take the spouse and kids to
Disney World, which will in turn help Disney, and the merchants in the
Greater Orlando Metropolitan Area. It's win, win, win, all the way down!

Bastiat said: hey, wait a minute. (In French, of course.)
These would-be
street economists are concentrating on the visible effects of the
destruction. But they conveniently ignore the invisible effects: what
would have happened with the shopkeeper's money had he not
needed to spend it on window replacement. He might have bought shoes for
his kids, or a couple good books, or … Each one of those
purchases would have had its own beneficial cascade.

Once everything is taken into account, the broken-window universe is the
poorer one; there's one fewer good window, and the shopkeeper has lost
the time it took him to arrange for its replacement. There's nothing
to cheer about.

This is one of those parables that, if you let it, changes your
thinking permanently.
It's so obvious that you start wondering: how could anyone
have ever believed differently?

New Hampshire could have as many as 25,000 new renewable energy jobs in
10 years if President-elect Barack Obama's plan to invest $150 billion
in green energy is approved by Congress.

"Policies make the difference in this area," said Ross Gittell, a
University of New Hampshire economics professor at the Whittemore School
of Business and Economics in Durham, during his presentation Wednesday
at the Portsmouth Public Library.

Now, Ross Gittell is not only a fellow UNH employee, he is speaking
within his area of expertise and award-winning
employment. Whereas, I, most emphatically, am not.

Nevertheless: if the paper is reporting his speech fully and fairly, he
is completely caught up in the broken-window fallacy. He's pointing proudly
to the "seen": many new peachy jobs to be had at the tail end of
the $150 billion money spigot that Obama and a presumably willing
Congress will open up.

And he's diligently ignoring the "not seen": whatever that $150 billion
would have done instead, had it been left in the hands of
taxpayers to spend or invest according to their own lights.

An article in another local publication, Seacoast
Online, also
reported on Prof Gittell's talk, and is both
more opinionated, and unintentionally revealing, about the stakes:

What became clear during Gittell's presentation at the Portsmouth Public
Library on Thursday was that while there is a work being done by
individuals, businesses and municipalities on sustainability, these
efforts are not coordinated or focused on creating jobs.

It is critical that some organization, perhaps the [Rockingham Economic
Development Corporation, a local non-profit], create a
subcommittee that brings all these efforts together in order to develop
a plan for, first, getting access to the promised federal money and,
second, making sure that money goes toward the development of viable,
high-paying jobs in the new green sector.

If I may summarize: if and when that cash starts getting sucked out
of taxpayer
pockets, we'd better be sure our political ducks are in a row in order
to get "our share".

And our local economy will start its grand
transition from producing goods and services that people actually
want, to wheedling government dependence, producing
whatever the politicians
think people should be buying.

Good luck with that. It's been a failure ending in poverty and
corruption everywhere else, but hey, I'm sure Obama and his Democratic
team will be able to make a go of it.

Supplementary reading today:
George Will expounds on American-brand socialism:

Either markets allocate resources, or government -- meaning politics --
allocates them. Now that distrust of markets is high, Americans are
supposed to believe that the institution they trust least -- Congress --
will pony up $1 trillion and then passively recede, never putting its 10
thumbs, like a manic Jack Horner, into the pie? Surely Congress will
direct the executive branch to show compassion for this, that and
the other industry. And it will mandate "socially responsible" spending
-- an infinitely elastic term -- by the favored companies.

The Tall T

This is part of a box set of Westerns directed by the legendary
Budd Boetticher. This one was a B-picture, released (according to IMDB)
as a double
feature with Hellcats of the Navy, which starred Ronald Reagan
and his not-yet-wife Nancy. Cool!

Randolph Scott plays Pat Brennan, an affable rancher, trying
to make a go of his new place after years of working for other
people. But he finds himself in the middle of a stagecoach robbery that
quickly turns into a kidnapping scheme, masterminded by Frank Usher
(played by Richard Boone). The victim is Maureen O'Sullivan, who's
married to weasely John Hubbard, in a performance that might have been
the inspiration for the character of Hedley Lamarr in Blazing
Saddles.

Both Boone and Scott have faces that seem to have been carved out of
granite, and the movie touches ever so lightly on their shared
bond of masculine honor. (It's a bond you can share even if you're
a thief, kidnapper, and cold-blooded murderer. Go figure.)

The extras on the DVD are pretty good; there are a whole bunch of
Hollywood vets willing to tell stories about Boetticher and provide
insight into his filmmaking style: Robert Stack, Martin Scorsese, Peter
Bogdonovich, Taylor Hackford. And (in a bit of magical Hollyword
weirdness) Clint Eastwood sitting next to Quentin Tarantino.
Awesome.

URLs du Jour

Get it? Over the Lincoln Memorial?
The moon turned into an "O" in the title? Which stands
for… Get it?

Are we in for (at least) four years of tedious sycophancy? All signs point to
yes. Here's Roger Angell:

When the news came, not late on Tuesday night, we did some hugs and high
fives at my place, drank a little champagne, and dampened up at the
sight of Jesse Jackson in tears amid the crowd of a hundred and fifty
thousand or so in Chicago.

It's like a print version of MSNBC. But if you keep reading, there's
a pretty good story of Angell's (single) black Harvard classmate,
buried amongst
the guilt-tripping sanctimony.

At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux is appropriately terrified
by the cover's symbolic secular theology,
and deploys a Mencken quote in defense. (Remember those movies
where they held up a cross to fend off
a vampire? Same kind of deal.)

Will Wilkinson is horrified
by another objet d'art in the same vein. Aiieee!

URLs du Jour

2008-11-12

General Motors, apparently baffled on the whole concept of
making cars that people want to buy, is going to Plan B:
get Your Federal Government to divert some more taxpayer money their way.
Just $50
Billion or so. This is in addition to the $25 Billion "loan
program" already approved. Because, gee Dad, that was so last month.

Megan McArdle has a couple good posts on that, one yesterday,
one today.
From the latter:

Bailing out the auto industry offers no net gain to society. It is
a straight transfer of resources from one sector to another: we
tax money, or borrow it from a finite pool of capital available to the
nation, and spend it on auto workers. The people who pay the
taxes, or the people who would have borrowed that investment capital,
now have less to spend. Whatever they would have bought goes
unbought; whoever would have made it goes unemployed. To coin a phrase,
what is made on the swings is lost on the roundabouts We have the
illusion of a gain only because that other group of people is
invisible. Even if we don't bail out GM, they will not be
visible--we will never know who didn't lose a job or a business
because we declined to spend one squillion dollars saving the Chevy
Cobalt.

Simple enough, right? At the WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. also
makes
a lot of sense on one piece of GM's woes.

You have in GM's Volt a perfect car of the
Age of Obama -- or at least the Honeymoon of Obama, before the reality
principle kicks in.

Even as GM teeters toward bankruptcy and wheedles for billions in
public aid, its forthcoming plug-in hybrid continues to absorb a big
chunk of the company's product development budget. This is a car that,
by GM's own admission, won't make money. It's a car that can't possibly
provide a buyer with value commensurate with the resources and labor
needed to build it. It's a car that will be unsalable without multiple
handouts from government.

"Handouts from government" is an unfortunate euphemism for the WSJ; what
Holman means is "coerced funding from taxpayers."

In case you maintained some small illusions of the usefulness
of the Federal Election Commission and the McCain-Feingold
campaign finance "reform" legislation, let Dafydd
disabuse you, as he reacts to the news:

The Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially
embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential
campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of
questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign
crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to
complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will
take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to
defend.

Anathem

I'm reminded of a book title of a few years back: A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius. Except heartbreaking isn't the
right word for Anathem; it's more like breathtaking or
awe-inspiring. Also very heavy. It's over 900 pages,
including glossary and supplementary material, with a lot of funny
language and unfamiliar settings and situations. It's kind of a project,
and there's a lot of Stephensonian red meat for the geeky. (You don't
have to know what a directed acyclic graph is to enjoy the book, but
if you do…) It's also
very funny in spots.
I found it worthwhile, and did something I rarely do:
put it back in the pile to be read again
someday.

Anathem is set on a planet named Arbre. Society is divided
between the sæcular world—normal, everyday folk—and
the mathic world, made up of monastery-like "concents" where the "avout"—groups of philosophers, mathematicians,
and scientists—devote their lives to theory.
Interaction
between the two worlds is minimal and tightly controlled to maintain
social stability. There's also structure within the concent: it's
divided into maths: unarian, decanarian, centenarian, and millenarian;
with rare exceptions, the inhabitants are only allowed exit during their
"Apert" which happens (respectively) every year, ten years, hundred
years, and thousand years.

That's a very simplified description; it's much more complicated
than that.
Stephenson builds this world in amazing detail, not only its present,
but going back thousands of years, imagining how social structures,
science, and philosophy developed.

Our protagonist/narrator, Erasmas, is a decenarian who
became avout ten years previous. So
he still has memories of and connections to the sæcular. He's
curious, brilliant, and brave.
Without spoiling things, Erasmas slowly becomes aware of facts that
threaten to shake Arbre to its very foundations. He gets
caught up in events, sending him on a truly grand adventure.

Part of the fun is making the language connections. Arbre's "Adrakhonic
Theorem" is what we call the Pythagorean theorem; Occam's Razor is
"Gardan's Steelyard". Oddly, "rafters" are rafters, "t-shirts" are
t-shirts, and—hmmm—despite the fact that
Arbre is an alien world and an odd society, it's not that odd:
the inhabitants seem very human.
What's up with that? Is this some kind of Star Trek deal, where
a limited production budget means that the aliens have to be kind of
human? Or is it just the author's limited imagination?

URLs du Jour

Obama, the first plausible black presidential candidate in
American history, actually addressed the American people as a whole,
and when he evoked the language of class, it was to speak of the
middle class. And while Obama spoke of his victory as the
triumph of American principles, McCain spent most of his concession
speech rehearsing American's sins. What an irony for Obama to win
with what should have been a Republican approach, but it shows
how utterly the party lost its way in recent years. The
good news is that now they will be forced to rethink
and rebuild.

Barack Obama won the White House by campaigning against an unpopular
incumbent in a time of economic anxiety and lingering foreign policy
concerns. He offered voters an upbeat message, praised the nation as a
land of opportunity, promised tax cuts to just about everyone, and
overcame doubts about his experience with a strong performance in the
presidential debates.

Does this sound familiar? It should. Mr. Obama followed the approach
that worked for Ronald Reagan. His victory confirmed that voters still
embrace the guiding beliefs of the Reagan era.

So, to some extent, Obama won by
hitting Republican themes and sentiments
more convincingly than Republicans did.

So that could be good news:
there's little indication that the country has moved "leftward"
in any important sense.

Bad news: there's no indication that the GOP is going to learn that
lesson anytime soon.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said House Democrats will
continue to abide by their strict budget rules.

“We are committed to paygo,” Pelosi said at a lunch with
reporters. “I would like to make it the law of the land.”

Paygo, or pay-as-you-go, budget rules require Congress to offset any
new spending or tax cuts with spending reductions or additional
revenues. Democrats reinstated the rules when they took control of the
House and Senate this year.

As Congress gears up to pass another spending "stimulus" bill,
there's one political silver lining: Democrats are being forced to
abandon the pretense of fiscal conservatism known as "pay as you go"
budgeting.

Late last week the leader of the House Blue Dog Coalition, Tennessee
Democrat Jim Cooper, announced that with Barack Obama about to enter the
White House, "I'm not sure the old rules are relevant anymore." Why not?
Because, Mr. Cooper said, "It would be unfair to the new President to
put him in a budget straitjacket."

When I was a youngster, cartoons would occasionally demonstrate that
a character was flimflammed by morphing his head into a large lollipop,
helpfully labeled "Sucker". I'm thinking about how that applies to people
who voted Democrat on the fiscal responsibility issue.

URLs du Jour

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative
opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is
gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's
headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

P. J. is pessimistic and pissed off. And, as always, he gets the coveted
Pun Salad Read the Whole Thing award for the day.

Everyone in God's Green Blogosphere is linking to Greg
Mankiw's advice to President-elect Obama, and Pun Salad is no
exception. Prof Mankiw is the runner-up for today's RtWT award, so if you have
time… It's good advice, and to the extent that Obama follows it,
he's likely to anger a whole lot more Democrats than Republicans. So
how likely is that? Still, Obama is allegedly smart, and he does
have some good economic advisers.

Mark Steyn has more on the Newsweek
allegations about Sarah Palin's October 15 visit to New Hampshire. He
points out that the McCain people were arguably shirty to the GOP's
(doomed) gubernatorial candidate, Joe Kenney.

At QandO, McQ has more on the Obama "national
service" proposal. If you're not dissuaded by the sheer collectivism
of the proposal, maybe some of the utilitarian details will do the
trick.

Please also note that Obama's to-be White House Chief of Staff,
Rahm Emanuel, is unlikely to be a brake on any new sweeping
new coercive programs. As Jim Lindgren points
out, Rahm loves the word "universal", and among the things
he loves to stick it in front of is "citizen service."

Man of the Century

A unique entry in the small "screwball fantasy" genre, this movie was
very much under the radar when released in 1999. (As near as I can tell
from IMDB, it grossed slightly over 65 thousand dollars in three
recorded box-office weekends. That's not just under the radar, that's
under all other forms of electromagnetic radiation too.)

But James Lileks wrote about it, liked it, and that
was good enough for me. (You'll want to check out Lileks' take; he has
movie clips, lots of additional insight, and also uses
the term fin de siecle properly, something beyond the skills
of Pun Salad.)

The hero, "Johnny Twennies", lives in late-90s New York. But
he dresses, talks, and acts as if he
were the star of a 1920s talkie, full of fast-talking wisecracks
and patter. And he's in a mess of trouble: his girl is getting a little
fed up with his Hays-code morality; the paper he works for is in danger
of going under; and he's on the track of a mysterious mobster whose
thugs are threatening him.

It's rated R; while the strongest invective Johnny will utter is
an exasperated "Applesauce!", most of the other characters aren't
shy about using the less restrained lingo of modern New York.

There are a number of recognizable people along for the gag: the
late Frank Gorshin, the late Bobby Short. Anne Jackson plays Johnnie's
mom.

Both Mrs. Salad and I had a great deal of fun watching.
Movies like this are a fine argument for doing the DVDs-by-mail
thing with Netflix or Blockbuster; it's almost certainly never
going to show on TV, and if it ever was on the shelves of your
local video rental shop, it's long been displaced by the dozen
copies of Lethal Weapon 4.

Newsweek Yarn About Sarah Palin in NH Considered Dubious

The day of the third debate, Palin refused to go onstage with New
Hampshire GOP Sen. John Sununu and Jeb Bradley, a New Hampshire
congressman running for the Senate, because they were pro-choice and
because Bradley opposed drilling in Alaska. The McCain campaign ordered
her onstage at the next campaign stop, but she refused to acknowledge
the two Republican candidates standing behind her.

Bradley was not running for the Senate; he was running for his old House
seat.

It's doubtful that Sarah Palin would be reluctant to appear with Bradley
because of his ANWR position, since McCain—her running-mate,
remember?—had pretty much the same position.

John Sununu has (in fact) a 100% rating from the National Right to Life
Committee, matching up with his 0% rating from NARAL (used to be:
"National Abortion Rights Action League")

I will add a couple of my own observations:

While I think it's correct
that Sarah didn't share the stage with anyone,
the stage in the Dover High
School gym was pretty dinky, and in the middle of the gym, audience on
all sides. Having anyone up there during the speech would have been
distracting and tricky to choreograph.

Both John Sununu and Jeb Bradley gave pre-speeches, and Bradley actually
introduced Palin for her speech. If there was a snub here, it was lost
on your humble blogger, and I'm pretty sure everyone else in the gym
missed it too.

Also: while Bradley opposed ANWR drilling (and a lot
of other
energy-development stuff) while he was in Congress, during his
2008 campaign he adopted a pro-ANWR drilling stance (as ably recorded
by Granite
Grok.) In other words, at the time of the rally,
he was actually closer to Palin's position than McCain's.

Bradley is also considered pro-life, getting a measly 30%
from NARAL for his votes in Congress.

That's a lot of dubiousness contained in two measly Newsweek
sentences. I don't buy it; it has the smell of fourth-hand unchecked
storytelling.

Involuntary Servitude: Not Focus-Grouping Well

Since Pun Salad made a big deal out of this yesterday,
it's worth pointing out that the "America Serves" page
on President-elect Obama's "change.gov" website was drastically
revised yesterday to remove the "require" verb.

Notes on a Scandal

A sordid little drama about what happens when you make poor decisions.

There's Cate Blanchett playing Sheba, a new art teacher at an English
school where the students are (in the words of the narration) "future
plumbers, shop assistants, and doubtless the odd terrorist too."

Yes, the narrator is kind of a lunatic. She's Barbara, a poisonous
old repressed lesbian, played by M herself, Dame Judi Densch. She's
attracted to Sheba, and clueless Sheba is initially accepting, inviting
Barbara to lunch with her family.

But Sheba has her own problems, in addition to being a poor judge
of character; she's depressed over
her dead-end career, antsy in her saintly existence as wife
to her much older husband, and mother to a daughter (surly) and
son (Downs syndrome). She finds herself attracted to a 15-year-old
boy, and…

Well, what do you think happens? Hint: it's not everybody living
happily ever after.

Dame Judi and Cate act up a storm (both got Oscar nominations), but
unless you're into watching acting for its own sake—although
there's nothing wrong with that—this is pretty melodramatic and
predictable, once the plot pieces have been set up. Decent dialogue,
especially the Barb-narration, which reveals more to us about Barb than
she herself realizes.

URLs du Jour

2008-11-07

Kip Esquire has a dandy post analyzing the
proposal of powerful House Democrats to do away with the
tax advantages of 401(k) (and also, I assume, 403(b)) retirement
plans. If that weren't outrageous enough, the proposed replacement
is extremely similar to Dubya's defunct Social Security "privatization"
plan—the one Democrats screamed was risky and demonic.

Of course, there are some big differences: the Democratic plan is
compulsory while Bush's was optional;
Bush didn't propose gutting 401(k)/403(b) tax advantages; and the
Democratic plan prohibits workers from self-maintaining their investment
portfolios, instead
forcing them into buying government bonds (which are less
risky, but also provide anemic historical returns). In short, we're
talking financial nanny-statism here.

For example, Don does some pretty
simple math on President-elect Obama's proposal to
"enact a windfall profits tax on excessive oil company profits to give
American families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate."

Let's say there are 100 million "families," whatever that word means in
this context. $1000 each is $100 billion dollars. Last year the total
earnings for the S&P 500 energy sector -- which includes a lot more than
"oil companies" -- was about $140 billion. Are Obama and Biden saying
that 71% of the energy sector's profits are "excessive"?

I wouldn't make plans for that $1000 just yet.

In the "Now They Tell Us" Department: Obama's vague paeans to "community
service" during the campaign have turned concrete and mandatory.

Ilya Somin wrote a series of posts last year at
Volokh about mandatory national service. In addition to the
general increase in coercion, there's that pesky
Thirteenth Amendment issue to get around.

It's always encouraging
to see a newly-elected president trashing the Constitution before
he even assumes office.

Oh, and for any self-styled libertarian out there who supported
Obama: you are a bleepin' idiot.

[Update: the explicit mandatoriness has been removed from
the website. More on that here.]

Coming soon to a University near you: Margaret Soltan writes
on the UC Irvine professor who is refusing to take
mandatory sexual harassment prevention training, possibly costing
him his job. Lots of links, not recommended for those
prone to hypertension.

1:27 a.m. — Two teenagers are allegedly having sex in Woodman Park.
Police arrive in a commendable eight minutes but encounter nothing.

7:32 p.m. — A moose wanders along Route 125 in Gonic.

8:12 p.m. — The moose is now at Gonic Fire Station, but Fish & Game
won't come unless something clunks into it.

Saturday, Oct. 18

5:42 a.m. — On Cleveland Street, a skunk has its head stuck in a
receptacle. Police call the animal control officer but she does not
respond. An officer manages to remove the jar, and is recommended by The
Rochester Times for a bravery award.

11:40 a.m. — A state trooper moooves cows from the middle of Route
16.

1:45 p.m. — A Chestnut Street cat owner seeks advice on how to get
his cat out of an empty property. An officer gives him several hints.

6:44 p.m. — A moose stands at the airport fence and figures how to
get through.

Tuesday, Oct. 21

8:57 a.m. — A Richardson Street resident has a bone to pick with a
chiropractor's patients, regarding their parking habits.

5:52 p.m. — A piano truck from Londonderry is parked outside the
Party Supply store on Wakefield Street for over an hour. The storekeeper
asks who they are waiting for and is told it is none of her business and
that she should go away, a rude response which strikes the wrong chord
with her.

Wednesday, Oct. 22

12:03 p.m. — A sign bearing the message, "I am a bitter gun owner
and I vote" has appeared on Columbus Avenue to the annoyance of someone,
who is told that the sign is protected under free speech rights.

Thursday, Oct. 23

3:14 p.m. — At the station, a newcomer to Rochester says he
inadvertently drove the wrong way down Pine Street and was confronted by
a tall man with one eye (but a sharp one) who thumped his truck with a
fist.

Friday, Oct. 24

8:39 p.m. — There is a report of a large dead cat on Salmon Falls
Road that is causing motorists to swerve. Police recategorize it as a
large dead skunk.

Post Election Thoughts

One pony
in this roomful of manure: we now have years to continue our so-far
futile efforts to get the Pun Salad-invented
word "Barackrobatics" (rhetorical efforts to justify one's shifting
positions on a variety of issues) into the Googlable lexicon.

Most irritating win: Carol
Shea-Porter. Another two years with this toothache of a
Congresswoman.

For those hoping for Sarah Palin to make a presidential run in 2012:
who was the last losing vice-presidential candidate who went
on to win the presidency? This was a bit of trivia going around our
workplace this morning.

If you don't want to rack your brain today, there's a blog
post with the answer. Suffice to say: it's a very rare
occurrence, and (hint) the last time was 1920.

If you're feeling despondent, take hope from these words
from Peter Lynch:

Betting against America was a bad bet in the past. It'll be a bad bet in
the future.

My sister is smart, runs every one of my campaigns; is beautiful;
graduated with honors from college; is homecoming queen. But she’s a
… she is what I call a ‘girl-boy’ growing up, you know what I
mean?

Damn. Those hair plugs must have penetrated into his brain.

And finally…

Billy Dee Williams is a massive good sport.

Tomorrow, assuming our hangover is not totally debilitating, we
will diligently look
for ponies.

Panic Room

This is a neat little thriller that slipped by us when it first came
out. But it was on the tube recently, and a UFO (unexpected familial
obligation) forced me to
miss the ending. I hate that. So into the Blockbuster queue it went.

Jodie Foster plays Meg, in the process of splitting up with her
unfaithful husband. As revenge, she moves with her daughter into a huge
expensive brownstone, to be purchased by aforesaid hubby. As you might
guess, it has a panic room, a fortified space with lasers and TV monitors.
(Doesn't appear to have plumbing, though.)

As you also might guess, Meg and her diabetic
daughter need to use the
panic room on their very first night, as three desperate criminals break
in to abscond with some loot that the previous owner was alleged to have
stashed away. (Want to try to guess where? Ah, you're right.)

Fortunately, Meg pees ahead of time.

Jodie Foster has become kind of an action movie star lately, and
it's a good fit for her. The home invaders are played by
Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam, and Jared Leto; Yoakam is well-cast
as the creepy, psychotic one.

We usually look at current phony events, but since this is our last
in the series, let's take a longer range view:

Our first tally of phony hits, gathered August 8 of last year, is here. Interestingly, today's counts for Obama and McCain
aren't that
different from those gathered back then, nearly fifteen months ago.
Although I have no idea
what that might signify, if anything.

Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" result for Obama is
a blog post
by Chris Cilizza of the Washington Post written back in July of
2006. Cilizza made the hypothetical case for an Obama presidential
candidacy in 2008. (Telling quote: "We tend to doubt he will make the race").

The phony component is contributed by commenter "bill":

Obama is phony as the day is long. Typically Clintonesque in that he
espouses a "moderate" line; yet when he finally does speak he's
somewhere to the left of Chuck Shumer. Phony. Phony. Phony. Of course
with the Democratic Party looking something akin to picnic day at Haight
Ashbury, I suppose anyone who even sounds "moderate" is attractive to
the media. One caveat: look what the Dems did to Lieberman when he had
the audacity to leave the far left plantation - they turned on him.

To repeat: that was over two years ago.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Or
so I'm told.

On the other hand, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" for McCain is a
YouTube vlog from Jackie Mason from January of this year, a time
when Mason was utterly disgusted with McCain's misrepresentation of
Romney's statements on "timetables" in Iraq.

The Visitor

I'd been seeing Richard Jenkins in movies for many years, but
I first noticed him in an otherwise-dreary Jennifer Aniston
movie (Rumor Has It...), where he played Jennifer's dad.
He has an amazing little speech near the end of the movie that
made me sit up and take notice. And ever since, I've been watching
for movies where he appears. This is the first one, I think, where he
plays a lead role.

He plays Walter, an econ prof at a college in Connecticut, emotionally
shut down and stagnant after the death of his pianist wife. Apparently
he's trying to learn to play the piano to somehow reconnect with her
memory; it isn't going well.

Much against his wishes, Walter is sent to deliver a paper at a conference
in New York City. He decides to stay in the apartment he keeps, but
hasn't visited in years. To his surprise, it's occupied by a couple
of illegal aliens, a drummer from Syria and his girlfriend from Senegal.
(They're surprised too, since they were being scammed into paying rent.)
Being a decent sort, Walter allows them to stay until they can make
other arrangements. But gradually their relationship builds, fueled
by
his increasing fascination
with drumming; it turns out to have been just the thing to
bring him back to emotional life.

It's a nice little movie, especially if you like culture-clashes and
character redemption. Richard Jenkins doesn't disappoint, communicating
volumes about his character with the barest hints of eye movement and
lip twitches.

Unfortunately, the plot then enmeshes with a PC saga about
immigration and a harsh, unfeeling bureaucracy. OK, they probably had to
do something, but this is pretty predictable.

URLs du Jour

Exxon-Mobil announced that it had made the greatest profits of any
corporation in the history of the world: $14 billion in one quarter.
That's all your money. You are -- you are paying it at the gas station.

Her response (in its entirety):

Barack, once a person gives his money freely in a voluntary exchange of
currency for a commodity, that money does not belong to him anymore.
It's not surprising that the Prince of Redistribution does not
understand this concept, but it is surprising that he openly talks about
it, even in reddish states he'd like to win.

Indeed. And I would bet that, if you tricked him into
speaking candidly about government revenue, Obama would reveal
the opposite attitude: That's not your money, kid.
In fact, it never was. That's state money.

Senator Obama's non-candid words about taxation
aren't quite that blunt, but
almost. We keep coming back to Frédéric Bastiat's essay
"The
State", and its classic aphorism:

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to
live at the expense of everyone else.

"The point is, though, that -- and it’s not just charity, it’s
not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are
trying to get in the middle class -- it’s that when we actually make
sure that everybody’s got a shot – when young people can all go
to college, when everybody’s got decent health care, when
everybody’s got a little more money at the end of the month –
then guess what? Everybody starts spending that money, they decide maybe
I can afford a new car, maybe I can afford a computer for my child. They
can buy the products and services that businesses are selling and
everybody is better off. All boats rise. That’s what happened in the
1990s, that’s what we need to restore. And that’s what I’m
gonna do as president of the United States of America."

We'd never figure out how to make all those boats rise by
ourselves. Certainly once we start sending a whole bunch more
money to the state, they'll send it to just the right places to make
that happen.

Also, everyone will get a pony.

Progressives invented the term "trickle-down economics" to deride the
idea that lowering tax rates on higher-income earners would benefit the
economy as a whole. As Obama's remarks indicate, the "trickle-down"
label is more honestly applicable to his own theory of
government-induced prosperity: the
main difference is that the state is the entity doing the trickling,
rather than the free and private decisions of people spending their
own money.

And a lot of people have noticed Obama's following statement:

"John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic," Obama
continued. "You know I don’t know when, when they decided they
wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness."

In Obamaland, refusing to believe in Bastiat's "great fictitious
entity" is selfishness.

After the big gamble on subprime mortgages that led to the current
financial crisis, is there going to be an even bigger gamble, by putting
the fate of a nation in the hands of a man whose only qualifications are
ego and mouth?

Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be
achieved by not achieving anything else.

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